I Freed Myself From E-Mail's Grip — EARLIER this year, I became tired of my usual morning ritual of spending hours catching up on e-mail. So I did something drastic to take back control of my productivity. — I stopped using e-mail most of the time. I quickly realized that the more messages …

Sales Guy vs. Web Dude — I saw this on Dave Winer's Friendfeed stream yesterday. It's just too good not to post, even though its staged. Some adult language in there, and one NSFW image at the end. — The website for this show is usually at www.thewebsiteisdown.com …

Open Letter To Shel Israel - It's Over — When I first started my career, you made it a point to bury me online, and more importantly back channel as well. This is a fact. You and your crew went out of your way to take food off my plate. I never forgot that, and now you have something you'll never forget.

Windows Could Use a Rush of Fresh Air — MICROSOFT Windows has put on a lot of weight over the years. — Beginning as a thin veneer for older software code, it has become an obese monolith built on an ancient frame. Adding features, plugging security holes, fixing bugs …

The Smoking Gun — As Bill Gates closed the door for the final time Friday on his ex-office (Ballmer takes over Monday) the rhetoric about continued one day a week doesn't match the reality. Whether you believe Bill will have an ongoing role in Office and Windows futures …

The Google Way of Science — There's a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data.